Bye Bye Bicycle San Antonio

As I begin to ask the candidates running for city council and mayor, I realized it was time for a change from my old blog Bicycle San Antonio to the new aatblog. The ‘a’ ‘a’ ‘t’ stand for Alamo Alternative Transportation, and when I was looking for a domain name, aatblog.com was available. The reason for the change is simple, I don’t want any future blog post to be confused with the advocacy group Bike San Antonio especially the upcoming San Antonio Bicycle Voter’s Guide 2019 that I’m busy working on for the City’s May 4th election.

I’m not going to be deleting anything from Bicycle San Antonio at all and will continue to site back to it from time to time. My fear, unfounded or not, was that someone would try to sue the advocacy group, thinking that the voters guide came from them instead of me. For the record, I’m a private citizen simply trying to inform my fellow citizens on the bicycling, transit issues and new urbanism. Bike San Antonio is a 501c3 and due to that tax status, they can’t say anything about politics.

For now you can still reach me on my twitter handle @BikeSanAntonio, Instagram a thttps://www.instagram.com/bicyclesanantonio/ and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bikesanantonio/. It’s going to be awhile before I’m able to change all my Social Media pages to the aatblog. So please bear with me.

#ivotebike2017, the VIA Questions.

It's that time again, another Municipal Election is coming up in May.  It is now time to see if my questions from 2017 had any effect. In this posting, I'll be focusing on the three questions that I asked about the candidate position on VIA and how they influence the last two years.

The previous question that I asked.....

I. Are you willing to look for more funding options to improve and expand VIA bus service?

Thanks to the the efforts of Rey Saldaña, VIA got more funding from the city general funds for the fiscal year of 2018, and due to his efforts, by May 2018, VIA saw an increase in ridership on the routes that they improved frequency with more plans to increase frequency on several more routes. The problem coming up is that Saldaña is being term limited out of office thus threatening continued funding of VIA from the city general funds.  So in the upcoming election, I will be asking That as council member, will you continue to fund VIA with general funds to maintain VIA's level of service. 

82.1

J. Will you support free bus rides for all residents of SA?

This was my own personal question that I asked and laid out my case for it in a previous blog post "The Case for Free Bus Rides."  Since May 2017, we saw VIA offer free rides on Sept 5, 2017 due to the gasoline shortages only to have some people complain, "you don't go where I need to go."  There was even talk about "Fare Free Zones" at some of it's busiest stops, but that talk has gone away.  I cannot tell that if VIA's current UPass was a result of asking this question, but it definitely a move in the right direction.  UPass is a service to provide free rides for OLLU students and to all Alamo Community College students and faculity.  

Since the time of the election, a new idea has come along called "Fare Capping."  Already DART in Dallas has started using this method to make the buses more equitable and there's talk from Indianapolis about joining the ranks of DART and TriMet in Portland, Oregon using this method. In San Antonio, a VIA board member Ezra A Johnson said in a tweet (Image 82.1) that he'll be working on getting Fare Capping working here in San Antonio as soon as the technology becomes available to VIA.  
If you want to know what "Fare Capping is, I recommend that you watch the video below which is the best video out there explaining what it is.  

The Fare Capping Chronicles from TransitCenter on Vimeo.

K. Are you willing to bring Light Rail to a vote?
I added this question because a lot of people who read this blog want some type of passenger rail service in San Antonio if not a Tramway, then a Commuter Rail that is currently operational in the DFW and Austin area. But with the Mayor's reversal on this decision about rail and silly talk about the "Politically Correct Streetcar," he clearly went back on his word.  And because I know so much about transportation, I'm split.  On the one hand, I understand that having a rail line especially out to the AT&T Center will get spur fans out of their cars. But tramway systems built after the 1980's in the USA don't go where the people want go because they're usually placed on old abandon railroad right-of-ways where much of the abandoned industry was located. The train stations that are build are built with acres of parking lots surrounding the train station and not in locations connected to where people want to go. This recent story from Streetsblog Denver explains why even though Denver has a tramway system in place, the transit system as a whole isn't really useful. The same thing goes for Dallas. My fear that if we go with rail, then we'll end up like those other cities. 

In some ways, not going after rail does force San Antonio to focus on solutions that includes bicycles, making buses work fast and efficiently, pouring resources into VIA bus routes that stand to gain the most ridership, and working on land use policies that will that will promote not needing to own a person vehicle.  I am going to make the argument that if we had a tramway built in San Antonio, VIA would have never focus on the current Primo bus expansions that are taking place on Zarzamora and in the future, Military Dr. (Image 82.2) 

82.2

I can only hope that the leaders of this new nonprofit called ConnectSA have the vision to see past an automobile for people who are over the age of 60 are the main ones always complaining about the lack of available free parking and bike lanes making their driving miserable as if the lack of exercise isn't the real culprit.  I suggest that you get signed up to ConnectSA on information about meetings and events and to show your disgust when they come up with the same non solutions we have seen forever of not removing parking minimums, adding no HOV lanes, ignoring protected bikeways and avoiding bus only lanes. 

So it's now time to take a survey to see whether or not you think that the city council and mayor are even bicycle or transit friendly.  To Access the survey, please click here.   

My Plans for the Future of this Blog.
Since this blog shares a similar name to the Advocacy Group "Bike San Antonio," I'm going to be changing it to Alamo Alternative Transportation in March and will be doing any election recommendations for the 2019 election through that new blog. I'll post a link in this blog right before I write the last post. 

Also the questions that I will be asking the candidates about VIA will be....

• Do you support "Fare Capping"?
• Will you either maintain or increase the funding for VIA from the city of San Antonio general revenue?
• Do you understand what the "Trackless Train" is?

If you have any other questions that you want to ask the candidates, either take my survey on #ivotebike2017 which ends on March 1st, 2019 at 12:01am or leave them in the comments below. 
URL to Survey:  https://goo.gl/forms/aXNpGIILN96hwcHl2

Images:

82.1: A Screenshot of Ezra's Tweet. https://twitter.com/Ezra4SA/status/1088200720615202816

82.2: A Screenshot of the New Primo Bus Schedules.  https://www.viainfo.net/primo_service/